The Little Red Guard

by Wenguang Huang (Riverhead)

Humor is not the first thing one expects from a memoir that occupies itself with burial rites, but this lively chronicle of a Maoist-era family and its contraband coffin inspires as many laughs as it does tears. Huang begins his story in 1973, when, at the age of nine, he is forced to reconcile slogans promoting a superstition-free society with a grandmother who is afraid of ghosts and of separation from her deceased husband in the afterlife. As history shows, the conflicting philosophies of Confucianism and Communism that repeatedly rupture the Huang household also ravaged China at large. “Breaking an entire country away from long-held traditions practically overnight is a complicated business,” Huang writes. Nowhere was this more evident than in the nationwide disbelief in the Great Helmsman’s passing: all good comrades shall die one day, the government preached, but Chairman Mao? Surely he was immortal. ♦

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